Summary & Analysis

Study Tools

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)

Context

Discourse on Inequality

The Necessity of Freedom

In his work, Rousseau addresses freedom more than any
other problem of political philosophy and aims to explain how man
in the state of nature is blessed with an enviable total freedom.
This freedom is total for two reasons. First, natural man is physically
free because he is not constrained by a repressive state apparatus
or dominated by his fellow men. Second, he is psychologically and
spiritually free because he is not enslaved to any of the artificial
needs that characterize modern society. This second sense of freedom,
the freedom from need, makes up a particularly insightful and revolutionary component
of Rousseau’s philosophy. Rousseau believed modern man’s enslavement
to his own needs was responsible for all sorts of societal ills,
from exploitation and domination of others to poor self-esteem and
depression.

Rousseau believed that good government must have the freedom of
all its citizens as its most fundamental objective. TheSocial
Contract in particular is Rousseau’s attempt to imagine
the form of government that best affirms the individual freedom
of all its citizens, with certain constraints inherent to a complex,
modern, civil society. Rousseau acknowledged that as long as property
and laws exist, people can never be as entirely free in modern society
as they are in the state of nature, a point later echoed by Marx
and many other Communist and anarchist social philosophers. Nonetheless,
Rousseau strongly believed in the existence of certain principles
of government that, if enacted, can afford the members of society
a level of freedom that at least approximates the freedom enjoyed
in the state of nature. In TheSocial Contract and
his other works of political philosophy, Rousseau is devoted to
outlining these principles and how they may be given expression
in a functional modern state.

Defining the Natural and the State of Nature

For Rousseau to succeed in determining which societal
institutions and structures contradict man’s natural goodness and
freedom, he must first define the ”natural”. Rousseau strips away
all the ideas that centuries of development have imposed on the
true nature of man and concludes that many of the ideas we take
for granted, such as property, law, and moral inequality, actually
have no basis in nature. For Rousseau, modern society generally
compares unfavorably to the ”state of nature.”

As Rousseau discusses in the Discourse on Inequality and The Social
Contract, the state of nature is the hypothetical, prehistoric place
and time where human beings live uncorrupted by society. The most
important characteristic of the state of nature is that people have
complete physical freedom and are at liberty to do essentially as
they wish. That said, the state of nature also carries the drawback that
human beings have not yet discovered rationality or morality. In
different works, Rousseau alternately emphasizes the benefits and
shortfalls of the state of nature, but by and large he reveres it
for the physical freedom it grants people, allowing them to be unencumbered
by the coercive influence of the state and society. In this regard,
Rousseau’s conception of the state of nature is entirely more positive
than Hobbes’s conception of the same idea, as Hobbes, who originated
the term, viewed the state of nature as essentially a state of war
and savagery. This difference in definition indicates the two philosophers’
differing views of human nature, which Rousseau viewed as essentially
good and Hobbes as essentially base and brutal. Finally, Rousseau
acknowledged that although we can never return to the state of nature,
understanding it is essential for society’s members to more fully
realize their natural goodness.

The Danger of Need

Rousseau includes an analysis of human need as one element
in his comparison of modern society and the state of nature. According
to Rousseau, “needs” result from the passions, which make people desire
an object or activity. In the state of nature, human needs are strictly
limited to those things that ensure survival and reproduction, including
food, sleep, and sex. By contrast, as cooperation and division of
labor develop in modern society, the needs of men multiply to include
many nonessential things, such as friends, entertainment, and luxury
goods. As time goes by and these sorts of needs increasingly become
a part of everyday life, they become necessities. Although many
of these needs are initially pleasurable and even good for human
beings, men in modern society eventually become slaves to these
superfluous needs, and the whole of society is bound together and
shaped by their pursuit. As such, unnecessary needs are the foundation
of modern “moral inequality,” in that the pursuit of needs inevitably
means that some will be forced to work to fulfill the needs of others
and some will dominate their fellows when in a position to do so.

Rousseau’s conception of need, and especially the more
artificial types that dominate modern society, are a particularly
applicable element of his philosophy for the present time. Given
the immense wealth that exists in a country such as the United States
and the extent to which consumerism is the driving force behind
its economy, Rousseau’s insights should provoke reflection for anyone
concerned about the ways the American culture nurtures a population of
people increasingly enslaved by artificial needs.

The Possibility of Authenticity in Modern Life

Linked to Rousseau’s general attempt to understand how
modern life differs from life in the state of nature is his particular
focus on the question of how authentic the life of man is in modern
society. By authentic, Rousseau essentially means
how closely the life of modern man reflects the positive attributes
of his natural self. Not surprisingly, Rousseau feels that people
in modern society generally live quite inauthentic lives.

In the state of nature, man is free to simply attend to
his own natural needs and has few occasions to interact with other
people. He can simply “be,” while modern man must often “appear”
as much as “be” so as to deviously realize his ridiculous needs.

The entire system of artificial needs that governs the
life of civil society makes authenticity or truth in the dealings
of people with one another almost impossible. Since individuals
are always trying to deceive and/or dominate their fellow citizens
to realize their own individual needs, they rarely act in an authentic
way toward their fellow human beings. Even more damningly, the fact
that modern people organize their lives around artificial needs
means that they are inauthentic and untrue to themselves as well.
To Rousseau’s mind, the origin of civil society itself can be traced
to an act of deception, when one man invented the notion of private
property by enclosing a piece of land and convincing his simple
neighbors “this is mine,” while having no truthful basis whatsoever
to do so. Given this fact, the modern society that has sprung forth
from this act can be nothing but inauthentic to the core.

The Unnaturalness of Inequality

For Rousseau, the questions of why and how human beings
are naturally equal and unequal, if they are unequal at all, are
fundamental to his larger philosophical enquiry. To form his critique
of modern society’s problems, he must show that many of the forms
of inequality endemic to society are in fact not natural and can
therefore be remedied. His conclusions and larger line of reasoning
in this argument are laid out in the Discourse on Inequality,
but the basic thrust of his argument is that human inequality as
we know it does not exist in the state of nature. In fact, the only
kind of natural inequality, according to Rousseau, is the physical
inequality that exists among men in the state of nature who may
be more or less able to provide for themselves according to their
physical attributes.

Accordingly, all the inequalities we recognize in modern
society are characterized by the existence of different classes
or the domination and exploitation of some people by others. Rousseau
terms these kinds of inequalities moral inequalities,
and he devotes much of his political philosophy to identifying the
ways in which a just government can seek to overturn them. In general,
Rousseau’s meditations on inequality, as well as his radical assertion
of the notion that all men are by-and-large equal in their natural
state, were important inspirations for both the American and French
Revolutions.

The General Will and the Common Good

Perhaps the most difficult and quasi-metaphysical concept
in Rousseau’s political philosophy is the principle of the general
will. As Rousseau explains, the general will is the will of the
sovereign, or all the people together, that aims at the common good—what
is best for the state as a whole. Although each individual may have
his or her own particular will that expresses what is good for him
or her, in a healthy state, where people correctly value the collective
good of all over their own personal good, the amalgamation of all
particular wills, the “will of all,” is equivalent to the general
will. In a state where the vulgarities of private interest prevail
over the common interests of the collective, the will of all can
be something quite different from the general will. The most concrete
manifestation of the general will in a healthy state comes in the
form of law. To Rousseau, laws should always record what the people
collectively desire (the general will) and should always be universally
applicable to all members of the state. Further, they should exist
to ensure that people’s individual freedom is upheld, thereby guaranteeing
that people remain loyal to the sovereign at all times.

Rousseau’s abstract conception of the general will raises
some difficult questions. The first is, how can we know that the
will of all is really equivalent with the common good? The second
is, assuming that the general will is existent and can be expressed
in laws, what are the institutions that can accurately gauge and
codify the general will at any given time? Tackling these complex
dilemmas occupied a large portion of Rousseau’s political thought,
and he attempts to answer them in TheSocial
Contract, among other places.

The Idea of Collective Sovereignty

Until Rousseau’s time, the sovereign in any given state
was regarded as the central authority in that society, responsible
for enacting and enforcing all laws. Most often, the sovereign took
the form of an authoritative monarch who possessed absolute dominion
over his or her subjects. In Rousseau’s work, however, sovereignty
takes on a different meaning, as sovereignty is said to reside in
all the people of the society as a collective. The people, as a
sovereign entity, express their sovereignty through their general
will and must never have their sovereignty abrogated by anyone or
anything outside their collective self. In this regard, sovereignty
is not identified with the government but is instead opposed against
it. The government’s function is thus only to enforce and respect
the sovereign will of the people and in no way seek to repress or
dominate the general will.

“such were my parents. And of all the gifts with which Heaven endowed them, they left me but one, a sensitive heart. It had been the making of their happiness, but for me it has been the cause of all my misfortunes in my life.” (page 19)